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Pigeon’s WW2 Code Is ‘Unbreakable’

If only Alan Turing was still alive! The story of the dead pigeon via Reuters:

A World War Two code found strapped to the leg of a dead pigeon stuck in a chimney for the last 70 years may never be broken, a British intelligence agency said on Friday.

The bird was found by a man in Surrey, southern England while he was cleaning out a disused fireplace at his home earlier this month.

The message, a series of 27 groups of five letters each, was inside a red canister attached to the pigeon’s leg bone and has stumped code-breakers from Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Britain’s main electronic intelligence-gathering agency.

“Without access to the relevant codebooks and details of any additional encryption used, it will remain impossible to decrypt,” a GCHQ spokesman said…

They should publish the coded message and see how many minutes it would take one of these internet wunderkind to crack it.

BuzzCoastin

> “Without access to the relevant codebooks and details of any additional
encryption used, it will remain impossible to decrypt,” a GCHQ spokesman
said…

put it on the internet
and it will be decoded in less than a week

Calypso_1

no sir

Scaggs Holoway

Yes, put this on the internet, duh! Why are they holding the code from the public? Are they? Also, how about crowd sourcing the code for the Voynich Manuscript! That would be as cool as the science solving websites have for things like protein folding. Yeah, some competent hacker should let the people in on these things!

alizardx

Those of you who expect this to be decrypted quickly should google on “one-time pad”, the closest thing to a completely unbreakable encryption system that exists. Doesn’t take sophisticated computation to implement, though it certainly makes things easier.